


blood makes noise

by burnitdownbaby



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece & Rome, F/M, blood cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 14:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnitdownbaby/pseuds/burnitdownbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The first time he sees her, she is coming out of the woods, skin blue and lips red, marched in front of all the soldiers, and he thinks that she is the most fearsome thing he has ever seen.</i><br/>A historical AU for Cato and Clove, set in Gaul during the Roman Empire. Caesar is invading, Cato is a centurion, and Clove specializes in slitting the throats of the Romans. Written for the <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/clatoficholla">clatoficholla</a> on Tumblr, and the prompt was for a historical Clato AU, so here we are. Guess who watched the first episode of Rome recently.<br/>CW for mentions of blood and descriptions of violence</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood makes noise

The first time he sees her, she is coming out of the woods, skin blue and lips red, marched in front of all the soldiers, and he thinks that she is the most fearsome thing he has ever seen.

The Gauls do not give up, he had been told by the older centurions, and would all die long before they would surrender. He has seen them many times before, but they always have pools of blood beneath them. Always dead. Caesar just wants their land, he knows. He is to be the next Alexander the Great, they say, and glory of Rome follows him across the world.

She looks ahead, dark eyes never moving away from the eagle perched at the center of the camp, even as the men of the army call after her. She is young; old enough to have a husband, of course, but still young. As they walk, the men who caught her laugh and distribute the weapons that she had with her. A long knife with a thick blade, and a collection of smaller blades as well. All have leather grips and are a sharp as they can be. The leather is stained with blood.

He thinks he loves her.

She is gone the next day, escaped into the black of the night, leaving a trail of bloody throats in her wake.

The eagle is gone. The camp is in an uproar. 

He volunteers to find it. After all, he knows exactly who it will be with.

 

She is no easy creature to track, but there is one road the Gauls frequently use, and so he travels it. They ordered some other centurion to accompany him, Marvel, and he is young and Cato detests him. When the soldier sleeps through his watch that evening and gets his throat slit, he does not mourn for him. If anything, this leads him one step closer to the girl.

It takes him 3 days to find her; too easy, if he was being honest. It was almost as if she wanted him to find her, to find the eagle, to come and leave and never see her again. 

The eagle is behind her, all glittering gold, though she shines right in front of it, all heavy jewelry and bracelets and a golden corset over her tunics. She does not look like the savages that the other men had spoken of, with their torn clothing and painted blue skin. There are still hints of the blue tinted on her, above her breasts and on her knees and arms. 

“I’m going to have to kill you,” he says, though he is not sure if she understands. Does it truly matter? She will be dead, the eagle will be his, and they will all move on. He will return to his wife with the golden hair back in Rome, and the Gaul will die. His hand moves towards his sword, slowly at first, but he should have known better. The girl is quick, and in a flash her knives are drawn and she is upon him, knocking back his hand from the hilt. He is pinned to the ground (the heavy armor does not help) with her knife to his throat, and all he can do is smile.

She smiles back, her lips maroon, and it takes him a moment to realize that it is not paint that tints them that color.

Blood.

“You move fast for a Gaul,” he laughs. 

She leans in closer, chest pressed to him, lips only inches away. “I know,” she says in broken Latin, still grinning. “I am much faster than you, faster than any Roman man. Deadlier, too.” He squirms beneath her, moving to push her off him, but her knife is pressed harder onto his throat and he stops. “You come into our land and call it your own and take everything that you want. What gives you the right to us?”

He does not answer her; he does not need to. “What is it that you want, Roman? Your eagle? Your sword back? To rape and kill your way across my home?” Silence again. Every word she speaks is as sharp as her knife, and he flinches away. At the same time, though, he almost wants to lean forward and tasted the blood on her lips. For as monstrous as she is, she is still beautiful. And oh, it has been so long since he has tasted blood.

“Tell me your name, at least, if you are going to kill me.”

“Clove. And you, dead man, what is yours?”

“Cato.”

Clove laughs at him. “You are not as great as the Cato I have heard of, I think. 

“He is not a soldier.”

“Are you truly a soldier? Because at the moment it appears that there is a female Gaul prepared to kill you.” That shuts him up.

They are silent briefly, and she examines him, his bright eyes and golden hair and centurion armor. “You have killed before?” she asks.

It is his turn to laugh this time, and he can feel the blade against his Adam’s apple as he chuckles. “Of course I have. I’ve killed in battle, in sparring. I’ve killed some of your people.” There’s a flash in her eyes when Cato says that, like the reflection of sunlight off of steel. It is then, for the first time, that he notices how cold they are. But he continues. “I’ve spilt your people’s blood on your own land. I’ve cut men open and watched their innards fall out, heard them beg and cry and scream in whatever tongue it is that you truly speak. I’ve killed plenty. Even if you seem to disagree, I am a soldier.”

She scoffs. “Do you think that I have not killed? All those men last night, who do you think opened their throats? They are simply a number on my list. I’ve seen many a man choke on his own blood from my knife. You will be the next.”  
“A knife is a woman’s weapon.”

“Truly? Because it seems to do the job better than your little toy sword.”

They spit insults back and forth, equals in at least that one way.

 

It is ultimately his own rage that kills him.

She sits perched upon his hips, teasing and taunting and poking and prodding at him for what seems like ages to the soldier. A Roman man can only take so much, and he lunges for her.

He forgot about the knife at his throat.

She does not hesitate to flick her wrist, and with a slide of the blade, his throat opens. It comes out in waves, sputtering and spilling across the grass and his chest. His eyes are wide, and she stares into them the entire time.

When she stands, there is blood on her tunic, on her wrist, on her mouth. She does not care.

She leaves the eagle next to his body, and hopes that the empire will soon be as dead as this poor fool.


End file.
